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Title: Premonitions Author: Q. Libet Date: October 2011 Language: en Topics: crisis, Occupy Wall Street Source: Retrieved on November 15, 2011 from http://libcom.org/library/premonitions
“The coming occupations will have no end in sight, and no means to
resolve them. When that happens, we will finally be ready to abandon
them.”
When we wrote that in December 2008 in New York City, after occupying a
university building by Union Square, we were treated as youthful
idealists, nihilist anarchists, even fascist thugs. What are your
demands? they asked. But what are you for? they wondered. Occupy
everything? they shrieked.
Alas. Our premonitions have come to pass.
It was only a matter of time. When the crisis first hit in the fall of
2008, its effects were diffuse, with individuals all over the country
feeling it simultaneously, yet not collectively. Students, who have both
the time to act and think free from the imperative to work, naturally
reacted first. With an insurrection in Greece brewing, and a
legitimation crisis of the American economy at hand, occupations without
demands spread from New York to California, with thousands involved.
Demands are irrelevant when no one can hear you, and so the only real
demand was to occupy itself. Immature maybe, but not stupid. With
foreclosures growing exponentially, and unemployment skyrocketing as
well, occupying one’s space and means of living is the most obvious of
actions. In the most unpolitical of Western democracies, one must first
create a space for politics to emerge.
But students on their own are nothing. Especially left radical ones.
Always half way in and half way out of work, the student can only
express frustration of what is to come, not what has been. Hence, the
theoretical advantage of the current wave of occupations, which takes it
starting point not as the looted future, but rather the broken present.
From here, one no longer needs to “convince” others what “may” happen;
rather, the present itself is cracking underneath everyone’s feet. And
only those living in skyscrapers can avoid the initial fractures.
Occupy Wall Street and its subsequent multiplications follow the
trajectory of American social struggle which began in the labor riots
after the civil war and continued with punctuated equilibrium up unto
the most recent flare ups in the anti-globalization protests of the
early second millennium. What is this trajectory? Simply put, at the
beginning of the refounded republic of America, the working population
demanded shorter hours and better pay, with independent representation
and collective bargaining rights. These specific demands, which
sometimes merged and sometimes conflicted with demands for women’s
suffrage and civil rights, were backed up with massive waves of
violence: strikes, sit-downs, street battles, riots, looting, arson.
While demanding specific guarantees for life by words, they demanded
nothing from the destroyed factories and trains by deeds. The normal
American citizen, the 99%, from Reconstruction to the Second World War,
was baptized in blood and blessed with material gains. Citizen
engagement in politics receded to the background of enjoying fresh
commodities. With a relative peace gained for white working men, the
sphere of political engagement opened to the other 99%, the black
population. The slowly building postwar struggle for civil rights
exploded in the 60’s, with not only demands for equal treatment and
respect, but also demands for inclusion in the material gains which the
white working population temporarily secured. These political and social
demands voiced in Washington and Selma were only the small foreground to
the colossal mute rage in the background which, when heard, shattered
the merchandise filled windows of Newark, Detroit, LA, Oakland, Chicago,
and almost every other inner-city neighborhood in America. The
self-destruction of their own neighborhoods was the sign of having
“nothing left to lose,” a political position which can’t but win.
As the movement for equality and civil rights crested, the youth and
anti-war movements of the mid 60’s and early 70’s gained in strength.
Taking the physical message of the race riots to heart — that there is
no victory without struggle — the young radicals mixed early labor
tactics with civil rights strategies, which blended into an ideology
that asserted its right to own the fruits of American society.
Everything was up for grabs, and everything shall be ours. The
specificity of political movements in this period was in the nature of
its general demands: freedom, equality, peace, everything.
But the struggle for a total demand broke in the mid 1970s, when the
crisis of the American economy led to a renewed class assault on those
who make the country run. This assault is ongoing. No longer could
anything be given to those who demanded, no longer must business and
government be beholden to its employees and citizens. This new relation
between governing and governed, between owners and laborers, was called
austerity. From this point on, the gains of the last century slowly
receded. Real wages stagnating while prices increasing, income
inequality exploding while unemployment rising, unimaginable wealth
produced while unbelievably few own it — the American dream bought on
bad credit, paid with a high interest rate, only softened by a coupon to
the movie theatre. What can one demand when there’s nothing left to
give?
“Not” having a demand is not a lack of anything, but a contradictory
assertion of one’s power and one’s weakness. Too weak to even try and
get something from those who dominate working life, and simultaneously
strong enough to try and accomplish the direct appropriation of one’s
soul, time, and activity apart from representation. A demandless
struggle reveals the totality of the enemy one fights and the unity of
those who fight it. Such a struggle “lays claim to no particular right
because the wrong it suffers is not a particular wrong but wrong in
general.” This ‘general wrong’ is the impersonal structure of
exploitation at the heart of our economic system — the forced selling of
one’s time and life activity to someone else in return for a wage —
which can never be overcome by any particular change, only by a total
one.
Yet the demandless struggle is not ‘radical’ because it has no demands,
just as the struggle for better wages is not ‘reformist’ because it
does. More important than the demands waged against power are the
demanding responsibilities that the situation itself calls forth. What
is specific about the current moment is the explicit recognition by
people themselves in public, together, out loud, indefinitely, of their
own condition in the conditions of others. In other words, people are
materially recognizing themselves while mutually recognizing each other.
The forms of these encounters, while spectacular, are nothing compared
to their contents. The questions of work, money, community, family, sex,
color, time, class, education, health, media, representation,
punishment, and faith are no longer individual questions. To think any
is to think through all, and to really think through all requires an
occupation without end. Occupations without end are infinite and free,
not because they are everywhere and last forever, but because there is
nothing outside determining them but themselves. The overcoming of the
occupations is the practical realization of such freedom, a task that
can only be accomplished historically.
Take heed: there is a rationality at work here, a reason of social
inferences which is made even more clear by the current lack of adequate
concepts to understand it. The major premise of the 99% perfectly
synthesizes the universal emptiness of the modern American, expressing
fully its entire being without reference to one determinate quality. The
truth of the occupations is not only in their substance, but in the
subjects as well. The minor premise of occupation locates the subjects
of the syllogism in a particular place and a particular time. Tied
together through material relations of interdependency, one is compelled
by logic to conclude that not even revolution is impossible.
The new era is profoundly revolutionary, and knows it. On every level of
modern society, nobody can and nobody wants to continue as before.
Nobody can peacefully manage the course of things from the top any
longer, because it has been discovered that the first fruits of the
crisis of the economy are not only ripe, but they have, in fact, begun
to rot. At base, nobody wants to submit to what is going on, and the
demand for life has now become a revolutionary program. The secret of
all the “wild” and “incomprehensible” negations that are mocking the old
order is the determination to make one’s own history.
Occupy Wall Street is the first major American response to the economic
crisis of 2008. But the economic crisis of 2008 is the first major
result to the failed response to the crisis of the 1970’s. In effect,
the delayed class war of the last three decades, in which Americans with
good faith gave businesses and government a generation to fix the
problem, has emerged with a vengeance. The time for waiting is over. The
age of austerity has hit its limit. Occupying everything without demands
is only the first baby step in the gigantic shoes of the new American
proletariat.
Q. Libet
October 2011